“ILLUMINATING” THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS?

9/15/14

In a September 5 column, Chicago Sun-Times writer Neil Steinberg, under the cover of a disingenuous offer of “illumination” for my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered a back-handed slap to one of the world’s great universities and nearly an entire state. 

Rarely letting a slight of an institution I hold dear go unanswered, I sent the following letter to the Sun-Times.  As I anticipated, the paper didn’t print my missive and certainly won’t now that all this time has passed.  So I thought I’d post the letter on my blog for your enjoyment and consideration:

Neil Steinberg is a columnist and columnists are not supposed to be objective.  The columnist’s job is to be opinionated.   However, one can be opinionated without being extraneously nasty…and missing one’s facts in the process.

In his offer of “illumination” to my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Steinberg fails on both counts.   One understands immediately that Mr. Steinberg doesn’t like the U of I, perhaps because it is too low brow for him.  But he can’t even offer the place a compliment (“bristling with programs and libraries and quirky collegiate peculiarities”) without prefacing those compliments with the back-handed slap that he expected my alma mater to be a “seedy sinkhole of downstate grimness.”   Mr. Steinberg has to go out of his way to insult not only one of the world’s great universities but the entire state of Illinois south of I-80.   But he’s only trying to help, don’t you see?

Mr. Steinberg, in his further denigration of the U of I, offers an absolutely silly criterion for judging the quality of a university:  he challenges us to name one University of Illinois professor.     How many people can name any professor anywhere?   Mr. Steinberg compounds his folly by answering his own question by citing Bill Ayers, who was on the faculty not at the University of Illinois at Champaign, the subject of his column, but at the University of Illinois at Chicago.   Perhaps a better criterion would be Nobel Prize winners; U of I has 11 Nobel laureates among its alumni and another 11 Nobel laureates among its non-alumni faculty.   Two Nobel laureates were both alums and faculty members.  Most people in my profession, investments, can name one of those faculty laureates, Franco Modigliani, the former UIUC professor who won the Nobel in Economics in 1985 primarily for his work on valuation of the firm.  Can Mr. Steinberg name any of the U of I’s Nobel winners?

One of Mr. Steinberg’s prescriptions for improving the U of I’s image is to admit fewer students, to lower its acceptance rate so that “those it did admit might get the sense they had achieved something truly significant by being admitted and actually go.”  Mr. Steinberg goes on, after that slap, to say that he doesn’t want to “minimize” that “a lot of kids work like demons to get in” and that “U of I represent(s) the attainment of their dreams,” but one can clearly smell insincerity there.  And how do you think the taxpayers of this state would react if U of I turned down more stellar students?   Who hasn’t heard the stories of kids with 33+ ACTS and perfect GPAs getting turned down for the engineering or business schools at U of I?   Mr. Steinberg wants more such stories?

We get it; Neil Steinberg, even though he “could see (his) boys going there,” doesn’t think U of I is up to his high standards.  But in explaining this position, does Mr. Steinberg have to go out of his way to insult not only an institution that continues to contribute so much to the worlds of business, technology, and the cause of academic excellence, but also nearly an entire state?